I Can’t Believe This

James Blake “Radio Silence”

James Blake’s deconstructed R&B has gradually shifted from strange outlier to mainstream trend over the past few years, to the point that his own music doesn’t quite have the same “whoa, what is this??” quality it had when he started releasing songs with vocals. He’s still a bit too weird to pass for normal, but his tracks are far more rich and sophisticated these days, with “Radio Silence” feeling so lush, dynamic, and emotional that it’s easy to miss how odd it is in compositional terms. Blake’s voice is great here, circling just a few sad sack lyrics with varying degrees of anger, self-pity, and loneliness as his piano and keyboard parts clank, hum, and sputter around him. The song captures the feeling of being stuck in a single negative thought, and your mind doesn’t just snap into a monotonous rhythmic pattern but instead makes the rest of your brain riff around it.

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